This is the third and final installment of Fr. Collins’ essay.
See the Vineyard issues of Nov. 16 and 30 for
the first two parts. The VOTF
Cleveland, OH site has
the complete
text and Fr. Collins has his
own website.

Another of his concerns was what he discerned to be
the Church’s becoming swallowed up in excessive
activism in order to prove its worth in the secularized
twentieth century. This was a betrayal of its purpose
to be prayerful and a contemplative presence in the world.
He asked, as the third session was about to begin why
that was happening? “I think the root of the trouble
is fear and truculence, unrealized, deep down. The realization
that the Church of Rome is not going to be able to maintain
a grandiose and preeminent sort of position, the old
prestige she has always had and the decisive say in the
things of the world, to some extent even in the last
centuries. Contemplation will be regarded more and more
as an official ‘dynamo’ source of inspiration
and power for the big guns out there: Carmelite nuns
generating electricity for the Holy Office, not so much
by contemplative prayer as by action and official public
prayer within an enclosure. In a word, the tempter of
the Roman Church is combative and ‘aroused’ and
the emphasis on contemplation is (if there is any at
all) dominated by a specific end in view so that implicitly
contemplation becomes ordered to action, which is so
easy in a certain type of scholastic thought, misunderstood.
When this happens, the real purity of the life of prayer
is gone.” (HGL ,367-368)

At the end of session three Merton was more convinced
than ever that the Church was having great difficulty
moving beyond its ancient philosophical structures which
meant little to that time and place. “It is even
more true that among many Christians there is a lack
of a living presence and witness to God, but rather an
abundance of words and formulas, together with rites
that many no longer understand. It is the old problem
of institutional religion and of traditions that remain
fixed in the past” (HGL, 452).

The Trappist wrote to a Sufi scholar, Martin Lings,
in early 1965 of feeling caught between baroque conservatism
and “a rather irresponsible and fantastic progressivism
a la Teilhard.” He was trying to cling to what
he called “a sane and living traditionalism in
full contact with the living contemplative experience
of the past – and with the presence of the Spirit
here and now.” (HGL, 454) He somewhat cynically
sensed that progressives didn’t know what they
were talking about “in their declarations about
modern man, the modern world, etc. Perhaps they are dealing
with some private myth or other. That is their affair.” (HGL
546) Merton was in favor definitely of “a new mentality” in
the Church but one that “implies above all a recovery
of ancient and original wisdom. And a real contact with
what is right before our noses” (HGL, 382).

In the years following the Council, despite the initial
enthusiasm for renewal and reform, Thomas Merton judged
that the conciliar hopes were being sidetracked or neglected. “It
is getting clearer and clearer that the institutional
Church does not measure up to the tasks that she believes
and proclaims to be hers, and it is a wonder more people
are not fully aware of that. I guess a lot are...” (HGL,
166). He expressed his fears that an authoritarian Church
would destroy itself by becoming increasingly incredible
to its thinking members. “Authority has simply
been abused too long in the Catholic Church and for many
people it just becomes utterly stupid and intolerable
to have to put up with the kind of jackassing around
that is posed in God’s name. It is an insult to
God Himself and in the end it can only discredit all
idea of authority and obedience. There comes a point
where they simply forfeit the right to be listened to” (HGL,
230).

In early 1967, in correspondence with Rosemary Radford
Ruether, the monk was trying to identify his place within
the Church, wondering if he belonged there any longer. “I
do wonder at times if the Church is real at all, I believe
it, you know. But I wonder if I am nuts to do so. Am
I part of a great big hoax? ...there is a real sense
of and confidence in an underlying reality, the presence
of Christ in the world which I don’t doubt for
an instant. But is that presence where we are all saying
it is? We are all pointing (in various directions) and
my dreadful feeling is that we are all pointing wrong.
Could you point someplace for me maybe?” (HGL,
499-500)

Ruether told Merton she considered the Church to be
less of an institution and more of a “happening.” He
liked that image and thought that if the two of them
and others were thinking in this direction “then
there is something going on.” He said, though,
that he felt the Church of the future “will be
a very scattered Church for a while. But as long as I
know what directions to be the one to go in, I will gladly
go in it.” He just did not want his sense of Church
to be a “deception.” “Because if that
is where God speaks and the Spirit acts, then I can be
confident that God has not abandoned us. Nor left us
at the mercy of the princes of the Church.” As
he looked back over the history of the Church, he could
see “a bigger and bigger hole of conscious bad
faith.” One example of which was the Catholic Church’s
dictating to all other religions “that we are the
one authentic outfit that has the real goods” (HGL,
500-502).

By mid-1967 Merton was clear that he needed “to
be free from a sort of denominational tag. Though I have
one in theory (people still have me categorized in terms
of The Seven Storey Mountain). I am really not any of
the things they think, and I don’t comfortably
wear the label of monk either, because I am now convinced
that the first way to be a decent monk is to be a non-monk
and an anti-monk, as far as the ‘image’ goes:
but I am certainly quite definite about wanting to stay
in the bushes (provided I can make some sort of noises
that will reach my offbeat friends)...” (HGL, 511)
He even told Ruether that, in some ways, he was “sneaking
out the back door of the Church without telling myself
that this is what I am doing. I don’t feel guilty
about this, though, and am conscious of it” (HGL,
509).

Later in 1967 the Trappist wrote of his pure faith as
a Christian. “Of all religions, Christianity is
the one that least needs techniques, or least needs to
depend on them. Nor is the overemphasis on sacraments
necessary either: the great thing is faith. With a pure
faith, our use of techniques, our understanding of the
psyche and our use of the sacraments all become really
meaningful. Without it, they are just routines” (HGL
532).

Thomas Merton’s attitude toward church reform
came through perhaps most strongly in his reactions to
the resignation of English theologian, Father Charles
Davis, both from the priesthood and from the Roman Catholic
Church in early 1967. He judged Davis’ criticisms
of the hierarchy as not “altogether baseless or
unjust.” Merton said that the institutional church
at that time was “too antiquated, too baroque,
and is so often in practice unjust, inhuman, arbitrary
and even absurd in its functioning. It sometimes imposes
useless and intolerable burdens on the human person and
demands outrageous sacrifices, often with no better result
than to maintain a rigid system in its rigidity and to
keep the same abuses established, one might think, until
kingdom comes.”

While Merton shared and respected Davis’ anguish
about the state of church affairs, he could not, however,
follow him in his conclusion “that the institutional
Church has now reached the point where it can hardly
be anything other than dishonest, tyrannical, mendacious
and inhuman....” “One can feel Fr. Davis
is still a brother without coming to the same conclusions
as he did.”

Merton noted an endemic pattern of combativeness in
Catholicism, a necessity to prove an adversary wrong
and a compulsion to always be right. This, he said, can
easily lead to witch-hunting in the Church and “finally
needs to find them in Rome.” “There comes
a time when it is no longer important to prove one’s
point, but simply to live, to surrender to God and to
love. There have been bad days when I might have considered
doing what Fr. Davis has done. In actual fact I have
never seriously considered leaving the Church, and though
the question of leaving the monastic state has presented
itself, I was not able to take it seriously for more
than five or ten minutes.... The absurdity, the prejudice,
the rigidity and unreasonableness one encounters in some
Catholics are nothing whatever when placed in the balance
with the grace, love and infinite mercy of Christ in
His Church.... This by no means implies passive obsequiousness
and blind obedience, but a willingness to listen, to
be patient, and to keep working to help the Church change
and renew herself from within. This is our task. Therefore
by God’s grace I remain a Catholic, a monk and
a hermit.”

Finally in this Lenten circular letter to friends, Merton
wrote that, ever since he had come to live in his hermitage,
he has wanted to stop fighting and arguing and proclaiming
and criticizing. “When one gets older,” he
said, “one realizes the futility of a life wasted
in argument when it should be given entirely to love” (Road
to Joy, 95-97).

In the end Merton could see himself as a bridge builder
within the Church “to keep communication open between
the extremists at both ends.” For “whatever
may happen,” he believed, “let us remember
that persons are more important than opinions.” (HGL,
324-325) One of the things he most admired about John
XXIII was his commitment to the Socratic principle. “This
means respect for persons, to the point where the person
of the adversary demands a hearing even when the authority
of one’s own ecclesial institution might appear
to be temporarily questioned. Actually, this Socratic
confidence in dialogue implies a deeper faith in the
Church than you find in a merely rigid, defensive, and
negative attitude which refuses all dialogue. The negative
view really suggests that the Church has something to
lose by engaging in dialogue with her adversaries. This
in turn is a rejection of the Christian Socratism which
sees that truth develops in conversation.” [bold
added] This meant for John and for Merton that one meets
one’s adversary as an equal and “The moment
one does this, he ceases to be an adversary” (Conjectures
of a Guilty Bystander, 217-218). He could see this new
life for the Church beginning to be expressed in Latin
American, Africa and Asia and he felt that the real movement,
when it comes, will start of itself.

Perhaps, as his life ended suddenly and tragically in
1968 at the early age of 53, Thomas Merton had become
in his own renewal and reform an incarnation of something
he had written to Catherine de Hueck Doherty in 1966: “Well,
we won’t really get out of the wilderness until
everything is pressed out and there is nothing left but
the pure wine to be offered to the Lord, transubstantiated
into his blood” (HGL, 24).

CONCLUSION

What can we who continue to care about ecclesial renewal
and reform learn from these gleaning’s from Merton’s
writings?

The Church is not primarily an organization but an organism.
One seeks to reform the structures of an organism in
a much more interior way than one sets about to restructure
an organization. One begins in a sense from the inside
and works toward the outside. I submit that one of the
reasons the reforms of the Second Vatican Council ran
into trouble and have caused so much contention and division
is that reform was not preceded by or at least accompanied
by profound spiritual renewal in the Mertonian model.
In many ways today’s intense questing for spirituality
can be read precisely as a symptom of the Church’s
failure to take spiritual renewal more seriously than
ecclesial reform.

Reforming Church governance is not about shared power
but about mutual empowerment in the Holy Spirit. And
that comes first of all and primarily from being persons
and communities of shared contemplative prayer. Otherwise
it can become much ado about nothing. Theology can be
a word game and governance a power struggle.

The Church exists as servant of The Reign of God. It
is not about itself but is a pointer to The Point. Unless
spiritual renewal is at the core of ecclesial reform,
the cart can be before the horse and the entire endeavor
will not be properly rooted and grounded. It will be
like building a house on sand rather than on a firm foundation.
That is why I began by quoting an old age: A theologian
is one who prayers and one who prays is a theologian.
And Thomas Merton was just such a contemplative theologian.